Elephantine Papyrus Request to Rebuild Jewish Temple Recreation on real papyrus in a 8.5 by 11 frame. This request or "Petition to Bagoas" (Sayce-Cowley collection) is a letter written in 407 BCE to Bagoas, the Persian governor of Judea, appealing for assistance in rebuilding the Jewish temple in Elephantine, which had recently been badly damaged by an antisemitic rampage on the part of the Elephantine community. The Elephantine Papyri are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts dating from the 5th century BCE. They come from a Jewish community at Elephantine. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Syene (Aswan). Hundreds of these Elephantine papyri, written in Hieratic and Demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic, span a period of 1000 years.